Communicating Success, Measuring Improvements, Sharing Results Page 1 of 19
Joel Blaine, Leslie Cook, Stacey Baumgarn
Joel Blaine:We have here the cover slide for our presentation, Communicating Success: Measuring Improvements and Sharing Results. This is a presentation brought to you in part by the Portfolio Manager Initiative, so if that’s what you’re looking for you’re in the right place. Welcome again. Along with me today I have the pleasure of introducing Leslie Cook from EPA and Stacey Baumgarn from Larimer County, Colorado who you’ll hear from more shortly.
The next slide – thanks. So this presentation is brought to you by DOE’s Technical Assistance Program, or TAP, in cooperation with EPA. TAP provides tools and resources needed to implement successful clean energy programs. You may be familiar with them, but if you’re not you can check out the TAP offering at the Solution Center. We have a link on the slide which we’ll have posted throughout the slides and also afterwards. You can check out what the Solution Center has to offer and also you’ll find a link to the Portfolio Manager Initiative Page. That’s the greatest place, a one-stop shop to see upcoming events for the Portfolio Manager Initiative to see what trainings are recommended for your peer groups.
Now I’ll turn it over to Leslie Cook. Leslie, would you mind giving a quick introduction?
Leslie Cook:Sure, thanks Joel. Hi everyone. My name is Leslie Cook and I work at the EPA here in Washington, D.C. and I work with the Energy Star Commercial Buildings program, so I’m very excited to be part of this webcast today. We’re very happy to have been part of this collaborative effort with the Department of Energy and reaching out to all of the EECBG teams and many of you, of course are Energy Star partners. It’s a great – a great collaborative initiative that we’re excited about.
Today we’re going to go through, as Joel said, a discussion on how you can utilize all of the great information that you’re going to be calculating and collecting and reporting in your efforts to measure your building performance levels in Portfolio Manager and how that can really be a cornerstone of the methods that you communicate your successes of your efficiency programs both internally, you know, amongst your staff and other colleagues and decision makers as well as externally. And I’m very excited to have Stacey Baumgarn speaking after me to give a real-life example; to talk about their county’s successes and how they’ve been able to leverage all of the great data that they’re collecting in Portfolio Manager and really use that as a showcase to show real savings.
Joel Blaine:Thanks, Leslie. This is Joel again. I forgot to mention a quick logistic issue. If everyone wants to enter their questions over the control panel on the right, we’ll be taking questions that you type in and hopefully cover them at the end, time permitting. If we don’t have time to get to them online we will follow up with you in an e-mail. So if you would, just type your questions in the question box area in the control panel on the right. Thank you. Leslie, I’m sorry.
Leslie Cook:Sure, that’s great. Very helpful. So part of this Portfolio Manager initiative, I know many of you have been a part of our training programs throughout the launch of the – our program and perhaps you’ve been engaged with Energy Star before the EECBG project got off the ground, or perhaps you’re new to Energy Star and our Portfolio Manager tool. So just to make sure we’re on the same page, I wanted to provide a bit of an overview of the Energy Star program and how our software, Portfolio Manager, fits in.
Many of you are hopefully aware of the Energy Star program. We are a voluntary public/private partnership program. We work in the products and home and commercial buildings and industrial plants markets. So just like you can go shopping and look for Energy Star-qualified products to indicate an energy efficiency level, you can also get that Energy Star certification for your buildings, and there’s a host of tools available for you in your work in commercial buildings. So Portfolio Manager is one component of our Energy Star commercial buildings program and we have lots of tools and resources for you. I would say Portfolio Manager really is the backbone of our program as we really find that the measurement and understanding of your building’s actual performance at the building level and at your portfolio level is really a key component to a successful energy management program, and Portfolio Manager is the software tool that many of our partners and others are using to assess their performance.
This could take a step back in general. The Department of Energy and EPA and all of you on the line I know recognize and are even increasing the recognition of all of the opportunities we have in our commercial existing buildings to reduce our energy use, reduce our waste and reduce our financial burden through reduction of energy costs, and of course there is many opportunities to check the climate through the reduction of gas emissions. And we found on average in this country about 50 percent of our carbon emissions are coming from our existing commercial buildings and industrial facilities. In our commercial facilities, we’re seeing on average about 30 percent of the energy we use in these facilities is energy that we don’t necessarily need. So our program and our coordination with DOE, we’re really looking to help all organizations become more efficient, use energy where and when you need it and nowhere else and find those cost-effective reduction strategies.
So getting back into Portfolio Manager, which is the focus of this initiative, as a reminder for those who haven’t been able to join our trainings, there’s a brief overview. This software tool is a cost-free online-based tool that is available for you and your local governments who are – or any organization, really, that’s managing or owning existing facilities. So school districts are using the tool, local governments, state governments. We’ve got a lot of market penetration in the private sector, so if you think about who makes up the building owners in your community, this is a tool that all those building owners can be using and probably a lot of them in your community may be using them already. About 230,000 buildings already benchmarked right now in Portfolio Manager, and we’re seeing those numbers grow.
A lot of that is much in thanks to the work that you are doing in your localities to promote efficiency and the coordination we’ve been doing with DOE. So the tool is something that you can use to take all of your utility consumption data and some of you on the line who are familiar with getting into the weeds of this consumption data, multiple utilities, multiple meters, multiple buildings that can get to be a burden to take all that and translate that into an understandable, easily-digestible performance metric, and Portfolio Manager can help you do that by taking all of your actual energy consumption data and you input it into the tool and you get key performance indicators at the whole building level.
That’s one thing to remember. It’s not just electricity, but it’s any energy you’re using in the building, and you’ll get helpful metrics like energy use intensity. When I say that, I mean energy use per square foot. You’ll get total energy use, you’ll be able to track your changes over a baseline, which I think is very helpful, especially for those of you implementing recovery acts funded projects and tracking those changes is key. You’ll be able to get a 1-100 score on many of your buildings and that is a one to 1-100 score that indicates your performance level as compared to your peers. Fifty would be the average, 100 would be the highest. If you receive a 75 or higher, if your building is able to get that score, then you can be eligible for an Energy Star certification.
The tool also tracks weather normalized energy if metric, so the variations of weather – and I don’t know where you are located in the country, but here in the DC area we’ve had some pretty wild weather variations. The tool would be able to normalize those differences for you, so that eliminates what we call statistical noise when you’re looking at your performance year to year and will also track and calculate for you your cost per building, your cost per square foot, your utility costs at the portfolio level and the pre- and post-financial performance levels as you’re working through your projects. We know nowadays those are very, very important metrics to track and to show, both internally and externally, that your projects are finding real cost savings and that’s critical.
And then of course lastly the tool calculates your carbon emissions that are generated with your energy that’s used onsite and that is helpful as well if you’re looking to communicate your pre- and post-gas emissions footprint of your operation. So the tool’s available at the Web site there and looking at today’s topic, which is not how to use it but to use Portfolio Manager, we’ve got lots of trainings available for you if you need to connect with those. We’ve got additional ones coming up with this initiative and we hold regular Webinars on Portfolio Manager to get into the ways of how to use it. Today’s topic is really looking at how you can document your savings in the tool, how can you generate some of these really critical reports and start to verify that the upgrade that you have planned or are implementing, are they really the savings that you expected.
Now is a critical time to look at what worked and what didn’t and what are the best practices coming out of the really great collection of activities that have been ongoing for years, and especially those that are split into the EECBG grants. Looking at verifying your results on the energy savings front, on the carbon front and especially on the financial front, we’ll give you the opportunity to really showcase your success and really verify that this effort was worth it and it’s worth continuing. Something we’re already interested in in this post-ARRA world is continuing the interest and the momentum that your projects have hopefully been gaining.
Show me the money, right? And I know that I’m preaching to the crowd here and the financial health of many organizations in this country can be struggling. If you’re not able to show through your efforts that these projects are saving energy costs, that have potential to save energy costs, it may be difficult to continue to get support for this work. Benchmarking in Portfolio Manager and really tracking closely and communicating those cost savings is gonna help you continue to gain that support. We have custom reports that will allow you to look building by building in Portfolio or groups of buildings as you customize them, how the financial performance is going and that could be by fuel or per square foot. We find that our partners are finding those more and more useful, especially nowadays.
We also have other tools that I won’t get into today, but I would urge you to go to that Web site on your screen – www.energystar.gov/financialevaluation. We have one tool is the casual opportunity calculator where you can input your building’s current performance level and you can input your actual utility rates that you are paying for the operation of that facility, and the tool will help you calculate the payback period and the cost of the way in terms of waiting to do a project. We have those tools so we can help empower building owners to make the business case to continue those kinds of projects and to not delay.
So what kind of reports do we have available? So getting your data into portfolio manager and maintaining your energy consumption data that continually affects your performance, that’s really what we think of as continuous benchmarking activities, so the fun stuff is really when you start to look at those performance metrics, environmental, energy and financial, and get them out in a way that’s mutual and informative and hopefully can continue to motivate change and be really customized and boosted up on reporting options over the last couple of years as more and more states and local governments are including Portfolio Manager in grant programs and other voluntary programs. You may have also seen that some localities have looked at policies that are mandating benchmarking and disclosure.
So, as our partners are utilizing Portfolio Manager in these ways, we wanted to really get better functionality available so you can use some of our predefined reports. You can see a list on your screen there where we’ve taken a group of what we’ve thought are people from electrics in these various categories like energy performance, utility cost, baseline comparison. That’s where you’re gonna get your pre- and post-performance levels when you’re looking at a project’s emission performance. I should also mention that you can benchmark your water performance in the tool as well. You can look at your energy use. So not a big focus of today, but I did want to mention that.
Those are the pre-populated reports that you’re able to use as you’re looking to gather up your results. You’re also able to take any information that you enter into the tool about your buildings and all of the metrics that are calculated really are yours to pick and choose to customize your own reports. Filter by building type if you’d like. Perhaps you’d like to filter by libraries. Maybe you had a focus on libraries, or maybe you had a focus on looking at different ages of office buildings and you want to compare those. It’s very customizable for you. You’re able to export that data that you pulled together and look at Microsoft Excel .xml comma separated or .pdf files.
I won’t go through this is too much detail, but I did want to include in this slide, which I know will be available to you at the end, how to create those reports in Portfolio Manager. You can get right to these reports as you log into your account next time you’re there to check out your building’s performance. I would recommend that you go into the reporting and play around for a little bit and get familiar with the functionality. There’s a universe support document there available that has step-by-step instructions. We’ve got some recorded trainings and live trainings as well. In short, you really just want to click on that Generate Reports and Graphs and it’s gonna take you to our reporting interface.
One screen shot I wanted to show you out of those that were listed there is just to give you a little bit of the look at feel. You’re going to be able to create your own custom report templates. Remember we’re looking at energy metrics and financial metrics and environmental metrics. Those have been bundled up in folders and it’s really just a drag-and-drop exercise. You can name your report templates and save them for future use. So every time you log in, if you choose to keep your report, it’ll be there. If you find out that you’ve made a great report and you want to share with others – perhaps you’ve got an initiative in your region and you’re working together as a group of local governments – you can all share the same report and start to share information, if that’s something you want to do.
So you really want to take what you’re doing and not only communicate within your organization, but if you choose to share with others, that’s something that you can use as a reporting interface to do. I think we’ll transition up into the next portion of my slides which is really talking about now that we’ve gone through the tools, reviewed Portfolio Manager and looked at the various reporting options that you had, what can you do with this information? It really is powerful to show the results of your projects. I think it’s critical to look at internal and external communications. I know many of you are putting out newsletters, you’re working with blogs, you’re doing Facebook. You’re probably interacting with your colleagues at various regional meetings or other conferences.
Start to think about how you can plug this performance data, these savings results, into your communications and how that can really boost your message and really show these are real-life savings. You want to be able to encourage your own colleagues. Think about the idea of taking your benchmarking results and sharing them amongst your facilities department so that you’re getting away from the process of just maybe a department is paying energy bills by department or maybe they have a centralized accounting responsibility, but think about the process that your facility folks ever get true performance metrics for facilities that they’ve done. Is that something that you’re sharing? If not then perhaps Portfolio Manager can help you do that.